Through the banner, children are thanking their mothers and fathers for being good parents. The site is the entrance to the Lu Xun Family Placa ,a compound of houses and museums in where Lu Xun, a great Chinese writer, was raised and studied. (Courtesy Elizabeth and Franklin Kury)

In April 1979, we traveled for 12 days throughout China with one of the first American groups to visit the country since it "opened" earlier that year.

We found a country stunningly different from our own. In Beijing, our sleep was disturbed by the clip-clop of horses drawing wagons through the streets. All of the people, men and women, wore blue Sun Yat Sen jackets and rode bicycles. We saw almost no automobiles. Collective farms, called communes, were the centerpiece of the economy. Posters of Chairman Mao Zedong, Premier Chou En-Lai and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin adorned walls everywhere, and large billboards proclaiming "Modernize by 2000!" were seen in public areas.

Thirty-four years later, that China has disappeared. Red brick, the symbol of 1979 China, has been replaced by technology, automobiles and modern buildings. The blue Sun Tat Sen jackets have been replaced lots of blue jeans, and young women wearing spike-heeled shoes and miniskirts. Posters of Mao, Chou and Stalin have vanished.

"Welcome to China"

As we entered Xian, our car crept along through heavy traffic congestion. When we commented on this, our guide promptly replied, "Welcome to China!" She told us that there are 800 new automobiles in Xian every day. Every city we visited is awash in automobiles and enmeshed in a system of freeways that rivals Los Angeles. In 1979, Beijing had a population of 10 million, 9 million bicycles and 200,000 automobiles. Now it has a population of 22 million, 1 million bicycles (many motor-powered) and 5 million automobiles. No wonder that Beijing has a serious air pollution problem that keeps the sky shrouded in smog. In all of China there are now 240 million cars and that number is growing.

Collective farms or communes have disappeared. Much of the rural population has moved to the cities where there is work of a different nature, or to newly constructed apartments near their villages. One of our biggest surprises was to see apartment buildings dominating the skyline in almost every rural area we visited.

Cities such as Hangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai and Xian are not only dominated by apartment buildings but also commercial skyscrapers. Shanghai, the financial center of China, has dozens of tall buildings, including three of the tallest skyscrapers in the world. We rose 1,552 feet rather quickly to the observation floor in the tallest one of them all.

Cell phone concentration

Cell phones, iPads and other electronic media are everywhere -- in airports, restaurants, squares and shops. There are now about 850 million cell phones and related devices in China. They are not considered a luxury, and if you don't have one, you are considered behind.

Cell phones have created a serious problem for the Chinese government because they make it infinitely more difficult to control information that the electronic media and Internet bring to users. As a result, according to columnist Lija Zhang, the government has erected the second Great Wall of China, an electronic firewall that prohibits Facebook and Twitter.

Three Gorges Project

Nothing demonstrates more that China has met its 1979 goal of modernization than the Three Gorges Project on the Yangtze River. It's the world's largest engineering project, which seeks to do for central China what the Tennessee Valley Authority did for the southern Appalachian area in the U.S. but on a much larger scale. The hydro elective power dam drops 340 feet and backs up water for 400 miles. It took 3,000 men to work 24/7 to produce the necessary concrete. This project, which controls the Yangtze's flow downstream, is used to alleviate flooding and drought and help cargo ships get to Chungking in central China. Started in 1995, the project will not be completed until 2015, when the final ship locks will be finished to allow ships of 10,000 tons to pass through the dam.

Learning English

We were impressed by the strong desire of Chinese students to learn English. Our host Huang Hui Jien, a professor of foreign languages at Zhejiang University of Technology in Hangzhou, asked us to speak to 350 of his students so that they could hear and see firsthand native English speakers.

One of them asked about "Moby Dick" and said she has read "The Old Man and the Sea" and "To Kill a Mockingbird." The desire to learn English was also evident at two middle schools in Hangzhou. At one of them, there is a board of honor for students who have studied for a year outside of China.

When we first met Hui Jien, he was a student assigned to improve his English by translating for our bus group. Now he is a full professor of English, owns two cars and three apartments and has been to the United States three times. He pushes his students hard to learn and develop inquiring minds.

Meeting with Lija Zhang

We spent an hour and a half talking with Lija Zhang in her apartment in Beijing. A columnist and speaker, Zhang is a critic of the Chinese government. She speaks out about the extent of corruption, which she says is widespread, and had just been interviewed by CNN on the subject. The corruption developed, she said, when those in power realized how much money was being made in China by foreign businesses.

Zhang says there's a wide discrepancy in income between those at the top and bottom. "See that building," she said as she pointed through a window to a large apartment building. "That is real wealth, but the people of my neighborhood are stuck in poverty."

When asked her if she felt threatened by the government because of her outspoken criticisms, Zhang said she's not. She sees herself as a bridge between the present-day China and a better political future.

China in 2047

China will not change as much economically in the next 34 years as it has since 1979. It is now a modernized, high-tech country with strong infrastructure such as airports, highways and high speed trains. Future economic change in China will be to keep up with the rest of the world, and not to catch up, as it has done in the recent years.

Dramatic new changes rest in the political arena, where progress has been relatively slight. The Chinese government is still an imperial regime where the ruling Communist Party has firm control over the military. Freedom to criticize and question the government is quite limited. China has been ruled by such imperial regimes for more than 2,500 years, so it's not realistic to expect that it will become a democratic state like ours.

What we can hope for is for a government that is more open and reasonable in respecting the rights of citizens to express themselves freely. We are hopeful that the forces of the electronic media and the works of Hui Jien and Zhang will bring this about.

Editor's note: Franklin L. Kury served in the state Senate from 1972 to 1980 and is the author of "Clean Politics, Clean Streams: A Legislative Autobiography." He is now a lobbyist and consultant with Malady& Wooten, a government affairs firm in Harrisburg.